We've had a lot of heated discussions over the past few months about various aspects of RacquetLadder.com. The aim of the site has always been to make participating in, and managing, a sports ladder easier, quicker, and more fun than anything currently out there. But, as always, there's a fine line to be walked between overloading users with options and settings and statistic screens, and keeping things as clean and simple as possible.
One of the more interesting issues we debated was the level of flexibility we wanted to give ladder managers in setting up and controlling access to their ladders. On the one hand, we want to allow people to have as much control over their ladders as possible, but when you work through the possible permutations that exist for running a ladder, that results in a lot of possible options! On the other hand, offering a one size fits all ladder isn't feasible when you start to think about the groups of people you tend to get playing in ladders.
So what we've done is breakdown the format of ladders we expect people to want into three types (the namings for these are likely to change before we launch). We have Public, Protected, and Private ladders. The great thing about breaking it down like this is that it actually helps to simplify things much more than it might initially appear. So let me go through what these three options mean when creating a ladder.
Private ladders are just that, totally private. They're ladders setup by a small group of people who just want to play amongst themselves. They're not interested in other people joining from outside, and these are people who likely know each other IRL. That lets us do some nice things. Firstly, we can drop a lot of options that might apply to a public ladder. It means the ladder is invite only, so there's no worrying about handling members of the public requesting to join, etc. We don't care about ladder gender, because it's invite only, so gender is defined by who the members choose to invite. We don't really need to care about what sport it is, and we don't care about how game arranging is handled, so we can remove a massive chunk of functionality and options for the members and managers of this ladder.
Protected ladders get a bit more complicated. These are ladders for large groups of people, who maybe belong to a company or other large institution, such as a school or university. This has some implications for how you handle the issue of letting people join. You want people to be able to join from outside, but you want to have control over this. So we're essentially talking about a membership approval system. So this is what we have. Members of the public can request to join the ladder, and this is approved by a ladder manager at their discretion. It also means, because of the public nature, we need to include some additional information for people browsing for ladders to join. We need to know where the ladder is, perhaps a gender restriction. Importantly, we also need to know which sport it's for (obviously!). So we have to start introducing more options, but with this being a ladder with a large number of people, this is probably OK for a manager to handle.
Public ladders basically do what they say on the tin. They're ladders totally open to the public. That means it's a group of people who likely don't know each other, and it's open to anyone from the general public to join. Because of this, we have to have all the options of the protected ladder, but we don't need any of the approval systems in place that a protected ladder would.
So by splitting up the types of ladders we offer into these three distinct categories, it lets us control how much a ladder manager has to deal with. And in the case of a private ladder, it's almost nothing. This helps us keep the system as simple as possible based on the three primary use-cases we see for the site.
It's a brief overview of how we've been looking at one of the various issues we've come across. Hopefully you'll come and see how this all works for real when we launch, over at
www.racquetladder.com.
A final note, which is more for personal enjoyment than anything, is that, in our research of other existing systems, we've not seen anything that remotely tackles these issues in the way we have. It's an approach I've seen from other system vendors in other areas, but not something that's ever been brought to the ladder/league systems. We think it makes a very real difference in the ease of use for a system like this, and we hope you agree when you get to try it out for yourselves.
